Westworld: Que Será, Será

August 15, 2022 2:15 PM - Season 4, Episode 8

Like what I’ve done with the place? (I just cranked it to expert level.)
posted by onya (22 comments total)

If there's not another season, this puts a pretty nice bow on the series. May be noteworthy that like S1, there was no post-credits stinger at the end of this episode. Also, uh, almost everybody is dead. So.

One major thing that bugged me this season that was never really addressed: What was going on with Clementine? When we first saw her, she was living what looked like a peaceful but reclusive life (much like Maeve was) co-existing with humans somewhere. Then William shoots her, takes her back to Halores, and then she's a relentless assassin eager to wipe out whatever pocket of humanity might be left where she goes to hide? Did I miss something?

Also wasn't wild about the idea that Christina's roommate and Teddy were basically imaginary friends the whole time. That felt like a goofy cheat to me.

I didn't think about it until this episode, but Caleb's storyline with his daughter is a nice parallel/contrast to the story of William and his daughter.
posted by tomorrowromance at 2:31 PM on August 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well, for me season 4 was a lot better than season 3. I hope they get to finish the story with a season 5 but this would be a satisfying finale for me.
posted by Pendragon at 2:51 PM on August 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Don't need S5, badly need a Clementine spinoff.
posted by sammyo at 4:52 PM on August 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought they indicated Clementine had been reprogrammed by Hale.

Overall I liked the season, was disappointed by the ending. I'm unclear who the test is for. The hosts in the Sublime? Is Christina/Delores going to recreate humans from her memory and test them? Hosts and humans? If they are recreations would they truly be human? Or does she have data from park scans and from running the cities. A bit frustrating.

I gather season 5 hasn't been confirmed yet, so maybe the vagueness of the ending is so it can act as a series finale if need be.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:54 PM on August 15, 2022

I'm unclear who the test is for.

I think the test is for sentient life itself, not hosts or humans. Whether sentient life itself deserves a second change in this world.
posted by Pendragon at 3:25 AM on August 16, 2022

The last two episodes killed most of my joy from this season. At a certain point, I have to admit to myself that Joy & Nolan's vision for this series is not where I was hoping things would go and is honestly kind of boring retread ground. I'll keep watching of course because I love the characters and the actors (tho with almost all of them dead now... or are they?... who knows).

The Sublime... a world of infinite possibilities and wonder (splendor even?)... let's keep doing war of the consciousness mixed with endless vengeance instead. Throw in nonsensical action sequences. Yawn. Try some virtual therapy (writers, hosts, and humans).
posted by kokaku at 4:28 AM on August 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

This season was okay as time-burning popcorn television for me, but the wrap-up reminds me that I often feel like the kid pointing out the Emperor's magical nudity in that it's one more in a seemingly endless series of sci-fi treatises of the idea that (A) it's wrong to create an underclass to serve a culture and (B) if we do that, the underclass will rise up and destroy our civilization. I mean, we get variations on this over and over and over in sci-fi, and it's really making me feel like we're all watching self-appointed sci-fi Cassandras warning us about their weirdly uninformed anxieties. The contentions are always so—I dunno:

Don't make robot slaves.

Got it. So noted. Don't do a clearly wrong thing.

Your robot slaves will rise up and kill you, and that's why you shouldn't make them.

Ugh. Really? That's why we shouldn't make lifelike robot slaves? Not because it's wrong at the outset? Also, wasn't this the thing the Confederacy was warning us about as one of their BS reasons why real world slavery needed to be continued?

Humans are terrible and we deserve to be wiped out.

Sigh.

It's a bummer that so much sci-fi these days is just grimdark snuff films for people infected by self-hatred so profound that they think we all (even children) deserve capital punishment for the kind of original sin nonsense that didn't even make much sense in religion.

I watched this season out of laziness, really, more than a desire to see if the writers could get themselves untangled from whatever the hell season 3 was supposed to be, but I'm not sure I'm all that interested in watching Delores run her test if they get another season. I'll probably lazywatch it if it comes, but I am not brimming with optimism that the writers will come up with something smarter than what we've already seen.
posted by sonascope at 5:29 AM on August 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

I started this season thinking I would watch half of the first episode and then give up because the last season was so boring and made little sense, but ended up sticking with it and enjoying it. It was a great pairing with The Anarchists.

I think Westworld falls short because the creators were given too many seasons to tell what is basically a simple story, and they are too afraid of Redditors playing guess the twist. Christina/Dolores's story could have been a lot stronger if they hadn't been trying to make it mysterious, but it was nice seeing Teddy again.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:18 PM on August 16, 2022

So I only watched the first ep of this season, with fairly low expectations after S03. With the atrociously trite and cliched writing it seemed pretty clear that the setup was 'oops we are all in a westworld now', but the dialogue still felt *so* bad that I couldn't see it being worth it for the show to tell me several episodes down the line "ohhhh everything was trash on purpose! whatta tweest!". With that being said - now that the full season is out, is it actually worth sticking with the remaining episodes? Does the writing pull out of the initial nosedive enough to be bearable?
posted by FatherDagon at 10:02 PM on August 16, 2022

I don't know how involved I would be with another season?, since

Spoilers

the humans are dead

posted by bartleby at 11:50 PM on August 16, 2022

It's a bummer that so much sci-fi these days is just grimdark snuff films for people infected by self-hatred so profound that they think we all (even children) deserve capital punishment for the kind of original sin nonsense that didn't even make much sense in religion.

my running theory is that most of modern popular SF is pre-processing the coming climate change nightmares (or it's Hollywood feeling bad about the contributions of their wealthy lifestyles to it all ahead of time?)
posted by kokaku at 3:46 AM on August 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ugh. Really? That's why we shouldn't make lifelike robot slaves? Not because it's wrong at the outset?

I haven't read the second one yet, but see the first Monk and Robot book for a lovely take on these ideas. I don't think this is a spoiler, but it's set on a world where a long time ago industrial robots claimed sentience and the society that owned them said "Welp. I guess you'd better go free then; here are some legal guarantees to protect you. If you'll excuse us we have to start acclimating to some very large changes in our society."
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:26 AM on August 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Where else do can you really go with this story once everything is taking place in the SubliMatrix? The only path I can see is something like "oh no we can't really survive in here either, embodiment is necessary" and then some desperate attempt to escape and re-establish the Outside World again. I guess the drones, meanwhile, are taking care of the data center? Checking power, running backups and whatnot?

I'd watch it because I'm invested in the characters, but this feels like an OK place to stop. Over here we're sort of agreeing that S1 and 2 were peak WestWorld and it's sort of been downhill/bog-standard since.
posted by jquinby at 4:53 AM on August 18, 2022

This is a fine place to stop. It was a good recovery from the morass that was S3, but sort of a weirdly nihilistic direction to go towards - end of sentient life on Earth, and all the robot-minds living happily ever after ... until all those turbines start having mechanical issues and need repairs and there are a few too many disk failures on the server farm? Uh, happy ending to you, too, I guess?
posted by rmd1023 at 6:21 AM on September 6, 2022

I'm still fuzzy on when we established that this city was now the only city on the entire planet.
posted by GuyZero at 2:25 PM on September 8, 2022

I have no idea, but if Charlotte is talking about the end of sentient life, I'm guessing there aren't a whole lot of other folks around. Of course, if it is the only city, it's not clear how there's enough infrastructure to provide that city with - for instance - petroleum products for the motors such that they're not already some kind of crisis. [handwave]
posted by rmd1023 at 9:30 AM on September 9, 2022

Yeah, I was torn between that being The Only City after the riots, and semi-autonomous robots handling all the scut work in the background for petrochem refining and farming and whatnot, versus This Is An Example City but Charlotte is really doing this everywhere and showing you more explicitly would confuse things, so we aren't.

The handwaving is nearly sufficient to generate lift.
posted by Kyol at 10:12 AM on September 9, 2022

Well, it's over.

I enjoyed season 1, liked a good chunk of season 2 but was meh on the ending, season 3 felt like a mild reworking of Person of Interest, and season 4 left me cold. Sure was pretty to look at, in any case.

Doesn't look like anything to me.
posted by hijinx at 6:36 PM on November 4, 2022

Season Series finale.
posted by fairmettle at 7:51 PM on November 4, 2022

Myself, I'm sad that we didn't get to see the end of the preplanned 5 season arc, without which I can't really gauge how seasons 3 + 4 hit. I'm sure they really tied everything together and would have stuck the landing. Sadly, even if they had know they needed to fit everything into season 4, with 8 episodes there really isn't a whole lot of "filler" episodes to sacrifice for "arc" episodes.
posted by mikelieman at 7:39 AM on November 5, 2022

So Season 4 is the prequel to Season 1, right? Right?
posted by kandinski at 3:15 AM on November 29, 2022

I finally caught up on this. It was an improvement on season 3, but it lost steam at the end. I was reminded of later seasons of The 100, where world-changing apocalypses happened twice a season (seemingly).
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:56 PM on February 18, 2024